Ruined myth: dead spaces in Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov’s Pavel Korchagin (1957)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The historical-revolutionary film Pavel Korchagin (1956) by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov is traditionally read in the context of a key trend of the period: the return to the screen of the romanticised ideals of the October Revolution, which (according to the rhetoric of the Thaw) had been distorted in the Stalin era. Thus, the character study of Pavel Korchagin and the process of Soviet myth-making stood in the centre of attention, while other elements, such as the film’s spaces, remained in the margins. This article explores the empty spaces – the abandoned railway and the barrack in the village of Boyarka, whence the hero returns at the film’s end, and are shown as contradictory to the ideology of the early Thaw. In post-war Western cinema, unlike Soviet cinema, the emptiness of dead, ruined spaces is a phenomenon that defines the era. Situating Pavel Korchagin not merely in the Soviet, but also in the Western context, the author examines the film as a unique example for the transitional period between the so-called ‘film famine’ of the late Stalin years and the Thaw in terms of the spatial representation of the myth of the ruin in Soviet cinema.